Blanket: Ann Carlson

Blanket: Ann Carlson

Memory tells stories in vastly different ways than do history books. It doesn't deliver neatly packaged narratives with a beginning, middle, and end; instead, it calls up personal history in sensory details: the smell of a bedspread, the feel of a favorite toy. In memory, time takes on a plastic quality; while the present moment may seem infinite, remembering the entire fourth grade may take no more than 90 seconds. Renowned contemporary dance artist Ann Carlson explores the way memory shapes narrative and time in Blanket. An old woman (Carlson) carrying tulips shuffles rhythmically in slow, jagged lines across the stage, accompanied by an audio montage of media snippets, instructional tapes, and music. As she moves, she makes jarringly lifelike infant coos and cries, which evolve quickly into the speech of a young woman. Together, these visual and aural layers create a jumbling of sensory details that is true to the disjointed language of memory. Time, too, contracts and expands in Blanket, in unpredictable but surprisingly realistic ways. Aurally, we witness a person's maturation within the span of 15 minutes -- Carlson drives this home by repeatedly asking the audience for the time. But when the old woman falls, her struggle to stand is excruciatingly protracted. Time here is distorted, yet somehow more true to the relationship between present time and memory than a more chronologically correct depiction of events would've been. In Carlson's piece, Picasso's saying that "art is the lie that makes us realize the truth" comes to life.